First off, I LOVE your site. It is the first place I go for any excel question and I love the daily emails. I’m not sure if you answer direct emails, but I’m begging you to at least read this and let me know if I’m crazy or not (good thing you don’t know me personally :>). I’ve searched through you ‘ask an excel’ blog and I have not come close to anything I’m trying to accomplish. I’ll do my best to explain it.

I have a group of employees- lets say 100 employees.

Each employee has a performance rating attached to them.I want to divide the group by 5%, 15%, 65%, 10%, 5% based on their performance rating.

So for example how I manually do this is by running the report of employees.

I then sort the list by Performance ratings from High to Low (0.0-5.0 is our range and you can have decimals in between 0.1, 2.5, 2.3 etc.)

I then take the total number of employees and calculate the top 5%, next the 15%, then 65%, then 10%, 5% (so breaking them up into groups).

Doing this isn’t horrible, but I have to do this for each department and we are talking 700 departments. Each department is not alike- so some may have 50 employees while others may have 200+.

Is there an easier way to do this in excel??

Anytime an email starts with I Love, I am all ears. So naturally I read the entire mail. And I had to sympathize with her. 700 DEPARTMENTS?!? Can you imagine dealing with 700 departments with lots of disgruntled employees. I remember my performance evaluation & rating days back when I had a full time job. Almost everyone I knew hated their bosses during the appraisal season. And when hikes are announced, everyone (including the person with fabulous hike) would call their favorite head hunter and flirt. Aah, good old days of ratings & reviews.

Download my solution

Now, some of you might be in same boat as Shelly. Please note that I sympathize with anyone who deals with people from 700 departments or more. But sympathy seldom solves struggle. So, go ahead and download my solution. Break it apart, examine the conditional formatting rules and fire the bottom 5% of your employees. Well, go easy on the last part 😛

My name is Chandoo. Thanks for dropping by. My mission is to make you awesome in Excel & your work. I live in Wellington, New Zealand. When I am not F9ing my formulas, I cycle, cook or play lego with my kids. Know more about me.

While this might solve the question Shelly asked, there is another option that might be more useful - a pivot table could make a list of people who fall into the various categories, so, if you needed to simply see who got in the top bracket to give them a bonus, you would have that list

Simply sorting by the rankings would work too, but you would knock them out of alphabetical order.

The issue I noted with this approach is that Zambi was not highlighted in my solution as it is in the solution provided. Unless I am mistaken, and I very well may be, the 10th percentile for this data set is at 2.21, so Zambi would fall above the 10th percentile with a PR of 2.3.

The first step to this was figuring out the 'buckets'; what scores should fall into each range. In attempting to match the formatting of the spreadsheet, I determined the buckets below.

5% = 95% to 100%
10% = 90% up to but not including 95%
65% = 10% up to but not including 90%
10% = 5% up to but not including 10%
5% = under 5%

After that, it is a relatively simple matter to plug the necessary values into the conditional formatting formulas as shown above.

One final consideration is that while the buckets above match the color banding on the spreadsheet, I believe that the original request suggests a different color banding with 6 buckets shown below.

Top 5% = 95 to 100% Dark blue
Top 10% = 85 up to but not including 95% Light blue
Top 65% = 35 up to but not including 85% Green

Bottom 10% = 10% down to but not including 5% Light Red
Bottom 5% = 5% or under Dark Red

This leaves one final bucket of 10 to 35% (exclusive of both values) that is not highlighted and so would remain white.

Thank you Chandoo and Shelly for an interesting and useful exercise. This is certainly a valuable technique to have in my reporting bag of tricks.

I agree, this is a challenge faced by HR managers every year and use of percentile formulae is the most popular solution which permits further processing like making bell curve, applying increments based on segmentation etc.

I came at the same solution as yours (not looking at yours first) but I have hard coded the conditions in the conditional formatting. For example:

=AND($C6>=$D$10,$C6<$D$9)

I have done the same thing 5 times for each condition. This makes the formatting independent of the order of specification. I think it will work better across versions of excel.

To copy the same thing in all sheets, Shelly can copy these formatted cells with format painter and apply it to the relevant cells in next sheet and so on! I know 700 sheets will be difficult but I dont know of any other way to apply conditional formating rules to the whole sheet.

First i have used percentile formula in the next column of "percentile Threshold" where E5, E6.. is input to colour code.
The idea behind doing this is to replicate the formula for any range and any threshold

=PERCENTILE($C$3:$C$30,1-E5)

=PERCENTILE($C$3:$C$30,1-E6)

=PERCENTILE($C$3:$C$30,1-E7)

=PERCENTILE($C$3:$C$30,1-E8)

=PERCENTILE($C$3:$C$30,1-E9)

Now i have given logic to different employee by applying "if Formula"

=+IF(J3>=$G$5,1,IF(J3>=$G$6,2,IF(J3>=$G$7,3,IF(J3>=$G$8,4,5))))

where 'J" referes to PR and "G" refers to percentile derived from above mentioned formula.
once again it is replicable (just change reference points)

Now comes the major part of Conditional Formatting, i have used "use a formula to determine which cells to be formatted"
Formula =$j=5, format "required colour" Applies to "$I$3:$J$30"
plus put tick on stop if true

This solves the query, important point that this is repeatable and can be done for n number of departments

I had done some reading on it and in Excel 2010 a new function has been introduced, percentile.exc. Attaching a video which also talks why the old percentile function shouldn't be used as it acts erroneous at times. Might be worth a watch Chandoo,http://www.itechtalk.com/thread10579.html

Hello Chandoo,
When i first read the challenge file, i thought, the color that need to be applied for a given rule, also need to be picked dynamically as given in rule set. But in the solution file, i found that color is hard Coded. So in case, someone has same data, but wants different colors, he/she needs to goto manage rules and change colors.
Let me know if my understanding is correct, and if yes, can we also make the color to be applied dynamic?

HI I ALSO USED THE PERCENTILE FUNCTION. HOWEVER, I WENT A STEP FURTHER AND USING THE SMALL() FUNCTION I SORTED THE DATA BY PERCENTILE SO THE COLOSCHEME WOULD BE GROUPED BASED ON THE VALUE. THIS WAY IT IS BETTER AND EASIER TO VIEW.

Hi, i have got doubt regarding to the percentages that has been put in chandoo's spreadsheet, i cant understadn how he put directly. can some one please explain how chandoo put the percetages straight way that i stated below..

I have stumbled on this post as the solution has been already given so I have taken the liberty to record a video where I show the implementation of it as well as adding a filtering feature which I hope can prove to be useful.

At Chandoo.org, I have one goal, "to make you awesome in excel and charting". This blog is started in 2007 and today has 1,000+ articles and tutorials on using excel, making better charts and workbooks. Read more.